What Is a Content Marketer?

Long ago, copywriting legend John Carlton told me that the best copywriters didn’t just master their own discipline; they also mastered related disciplines — like marketing, SEO, and negotiations.

This is true for content marketers, as well.

A content marketer is a master of many disciplines. But what exactly does that mean? What sort of disciplines and skills are we talking about? And what types of knowledge and experience are necessary to be a content marketer?

I’ll answer those questions and more, but before I do, I’ll first loosely define the term “content marketer.”

Then, I’ll tell you how I uncovered a successful content marketer’s five essential skills.

A working definition of “content marketer”

A content marketer is responsible for the planning, creating, and sharing of valuable content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content the content marketer shares depends upon what he sells. In other words, he educates people so that they know, like, and trust him enough to do business with him.

If a content marketer is responsible for marketing content, then let’s look at the classic definition of marketing, which involves the four P’s:

Identify, select, and develop a product

Set the price

Select the distribution channel to reach the customer where she is (place)

Plan and execute a promotion strategy

Using this model, content would be the product. The price could range from an email address (to receive blog updates, join an email newsletter) to payment for access to a content library, ebook, or online training course.

The place would be your blog/website, email list, and social media channels. And promotion would be how you share the product.

A content marketer is someone who understands how to position and promote content so that it reaches the widest audience and converts those people from prospects to subscribers to customers — and keeps them coming back.

This is important because, as C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley write in their book Content Rules, “[Good content] creates value by positioning you as a reliable and valuable source of vendor-agnostic information.”

In other words, stories help an audience get to know you, like you, and, ultimately, trust you — before you sell them anything.

The content marketer studies the storytelling techniques of movie screenwriters, novelists, and short story writers, so that when she writes content (see skill number three below to learn more), she knows how to lift prospects out of their ordinary worlds and invite them to consider a journey that ultimately leads to a transaction.

One storytelling method we are quite fond of around here is the Hero’s Journey. It’s content marketing that educates your audience through the storytelling arc.

2. Strategy

A great content marketer is also deliberate: she understands and communicates the overarching objective of an organization’s content marketing strategy.

4. Social media

Some content marketers might even make this their speciality, meeting the rising demand in the number and variety of different platforms. But most content marketers master one or two platforms and have a basic understanding of others.

See, a content marketer likes to tinker with the new shiny social media objects that come out. This allows her to evaluate a new platform’s potential and then translate this potential to the proper client.

She’ll understand which type of content works best on each platform. For example, Twitter is good for promoting new content. Facebook is good for engaging your audience in discussions and surveys. Pinterest is excellent for sharing images.

5. Subscription assets

Not only will they be responsible for writing the content for these subscription models, but they may also need to have a firm understanding of how each one works — or even have the ability to manage, measure, and monitor each model.

For example, a small business might assign the responsibility of writing, editing, uploading, monitoring, and measuring the emails for their email marketing campaigns to just one content marketer.

Stay one step ahead of your customers’ desires

Let me end with a quote from Catherine the Great, who took sole control of Russia in 1762 after deposing her husband, Emperor Peter III:

“One must govern in such a way that one’s people think they themselves want to do what one commands them to do.”

According to Robert Greene in his book The 48 Laws of Power, “to do this she had to be always a step ahead of their desires and to adapt to their resistance.”

Now, while Catherine the Great is talking about governing citizens, the core concept here is leadership. Thus, I think this advice applies equally well to the content marketer, who is, in a sense, a leader — a leader of content.

As a leader, she must champion the cause of content and then rally resources to create that content — and ultimately, create content that her audience wants.

Demian Farnworth

Want to graduate from the minor to the major leagues? Dominate your domain with an authorial voice that people listen to? Demian Farnworth can help you go from being a good writer to a great one. Learn more. You can also follow him on Twitter.

Great article and keeps me kicking my own ass when trying to improve and still be unique. Alot of great tips in here and I have already learned so much today so ‘pure value’. I must say that I always loved Rich Schefren’s approach to writing which was to be ‘counter-intuitive’ as a way to kind of shock the reader into having a peep. Great stuff thanks a mil!

Content marketers definitely have to master many different areas of their craft… including understanding “what business they are ‘really’ in.”

I really like that you brought the concept of leadership. I wrote about this topic recently on my blog and shared that leadership is a function of influence… and what is the goal of our content?

It’s to influence someone to take some kind of action based upon our perceived and real competency.

Understanding “what business you are ‘really’ in” means we have to understand the highly specific needs, problems, wants or desires of our our audience; understand who they specifically are and then communicate to them based on what they need.

It’s not about what I want as the content creator. Part of competency is being relevant to the audience so that in any one piece of content 20% of the audience is saying to themselves “OMG, how did he/she know?”

That’s a function of mastering our skills and leading the way; which means we have to be grounded in the details of our business and audience.